Resisting The Tyranny of the Screen, or, Must a Digital Edition be Electronic?

Daniel Paul O'Donnell

University of Lethbridge

§1. Most discussions of digital editing begin with a core assumption:
that digital and print practice are (or should be) fundamentally different or
even opposed to each other. Authors vary in the extent to which they believe
these oppositions and differences have manifested themselves in practice—Jerome
McGann, for example, celebrates the alterity of the digital in his famous essay,
"Rationale of HyperText" (McGann 1995/1997); Peter
Robinson laments the relative lack of practical difference between print and
digital editions in his recent Zeitschrift fur Computerphilologie article
(Robinson 2003). What both scholars share—with
each other and indeed most and perhaps all digital theorists—however, is
the premise that "digital" should in theory at least be different from
"print".

§2. The origins of this assumption are clear enough—and not
entirely wrong. Screen-based digital editions can and often do do a number of
things that are difficult or even impossible to do in print: they can be interactive,
fluid, and incorporate elements—such as sound, video, and colour photographs—difficult
or impossible to include in print codices. Screen based digital texts can also
operate in a dimension—time—that cannot be accommodated in print.
And of course the digital revolution of the last thirty years or so has changed
the way we understand texts and other types of culture: I think most of us now
think of and compose our own texts in a far less linear fashion than we or our
predecessors did as little as thirty or forty years ago.

§3. Another source of this assumption is historical analogy. Driven
largely by media theorists like McLuhan and Ong, digital theorists tend to see
the transition from "print" to "digital" in epochal terms: as equivalent to the
development and spread of moveable-type printing in Europe in the fifteenth century,
or the movement from oral to literate modes of communication. Those who believe
that digital texts currently are not different enough from print console themselves by
pointing out how long it took before early printers began to stop imitating manuscript
style and develop specifically print-based conventions. Those who believe that
the digital world has changed the way we see and understand texts tend to point
to the transition from oral to literate communication as a main point of comparison.

§4. Here too, the theorists are not entirely wrong. Screen-based
digital editions are only beginning to take the smallest of baby steps in the
direction of developing uniquely screen-based rhetorical and organisational conventions.
As Robinson pointed out, most editions still look very much like their print-based
predecessors and use many of the same conventions (2003).
And as he pointed out in a companion piece in the inaugural issue of Digital
Medievalist (2005), electronic presses are a long
way from showing authors the support and expertise necessary to develop meaningful,
discipline-wide house style: user interfaces still vary immensely from edition
to edition, and we are only beginning to see the smallest signs of the beginning
of a true electronic style. If we follow the analogy from the transition from
manuscript to print, then every digital edition produced to date has been part
of our incunabula: digital texts are still far too quirky and idiosyncratic to
be considered part of a fully developed medium.

§5. If we consider digital texts in the epochal context of the
transition from orality to literacy, we can probably also agree that digital
media are affecting the way we see texts and understand what we do as scholars.
People with word-processors do tend to write differently from those who
use a typewriter. And we are also beginning to see different types of scholarship:
the creation of databases and text archives has become much more mainstream and
widely practiced form of scholarship since the widespread adoption of computers
in the humanities. Without getting all Parry-and-Lordy about it, I think it probably
is safe to say that some kind of transition is going on in the way we work as
scholars in the information age.

§6. The interesting thing, however, is the ways in which the theorists
are wrong—or to put it more charitably, the ways in which their emphasis
on the opposition of print and digital can lead us astray. For while it is quite
true that digital culture differs from pre-digital culture in many ways, and
while it is also quite true to say that the screen offers possibilities and rhetorical
challenges not encountered in print media, the idea that "print" and "digital"
represent opposing poles of a fundamental dichotomy is false and indeed harmful
to the further development of digital editing as a scholarly means of communication.

§7. Perhaps the most important thing to realise is that it is not
the use of print that makes pre-digital culture different from digital: the real
origin of the difference lies in the fact that digital culture uses computers.
Print is a communications technology rather than, primarily, a tool for composition
and thinking about data. While the development of print did cause undeniable
changes in the development of scholarship, politics, history, and culture, these
changes came about as a by-product of rather than a direct result from the use
of moveable type.

§8. Computers, on the other hand, are primarily a technology for
composition and thinking about data. We can use computers to communicate, of
course. And it is true, I believe, that the explosion of information brought
on by the development of the world wide web is likely to change scholarship,
politics, history, and culture in ways analogous to the changes introduced by
the development of print. But the computer, unlike the printing press, is an
intellectual tool and platform rather than a specific medium of communication.
The exciting thing about computers is that they can be used to organise, manipulate,
and transmit information in a variety of ways and for a variety of purposes:
we can use them to build databases, catalogue books, create, transmit, and display
video or sound recordings, make telephone calls, send emails and chat... or write
texts that we can send to publishers to be turned into printed books.

§9. In other words, the main problem with the assumption that "print"
and "digital" are fundamentally different is that it involves a category error.
While there are fundamental differences between digital and pre-digital culture,
these differences are not caused by the medium of communication. Indeed the coming
of the computer age, has, if anything, increased our reliance on the printed
word. I suspect that more books are printed now than at any other time in history.
And it is certainly the case that we go through more office paper.

§10. The assumption that "print" and "digital" are fundamentally
opposed to each other has its origins in our definition of "digital". In common
use, the word "digital" is used to refer to three different things:

A way of understanding texts and culture encouraged by the use of computers
(i.e. cyber-culture)

As I have just argued, these senses—and especially the first versus
the second and third—are really quite distinct. The really significant
distinction between digital and pre-digital culture lies in the use we make of
computers to organise and manipulate data (Sense 2), and the way this ability
to manipulate data has changed our way of understanding textual culture (Sense
3). The fact that the results of this manipulation and processing can be shown
on a screen (Sense 1) is almost accidental. Screens are only one means of expressing
digital output: other media I have seen recently include include voice synthesizers
and loudspeakers (a disabled-accessible pedestrian crossing at the western entrance
of the University of Western Michigan), dental ceramics (crowns produced by my
dentist using a computer-driven 3-D mill), and paper (a print out I used to deliver
a lecture at the International Congress on Medieval Studies).

§11. There are two significant things about these examples: the
first is that each allows the designer to select the most appropriate
output format or formats for communicating digitally created, stored and manipulated
information. Loudspeakers and a voice synthesizer are the most appropriate media
for the crossing at the western gate of Western Michigan University because the
target audience for this information—visually handicapped pedestrians—don't
have much use for screens. Dental ceramics is the most appropriate output medium
for my dentist's computer when he is making crowns because his target audience,
the person with his or her mouth open in the dentist chair, are best served if
the results of his 3-D reconstruction are presented in a durable format that
can be glued in his or her mouth. And paper is the most appropriate format for
a lecture because one often uses a computer for showing slides and because paper
is easier to use during the talk itself.

§12. The second significant thing, however, is that each example
also allows for the use of multiple output formats: the signals at the western
entrance to Western Michigan University also have screens that indicate the same
information in graphic form for the benefit of sighted pedestrians; my dentist
drafted my crown using a computer screen before sending it to the mill; and when
I write a talk, I tend to do most of my editing on the screen before sending
the paper to a printer. The genius of the information age—and the thing
that truly sets the digital apart from the pre-digital—is this ability
to communicate information in multiple media, finding the exactly the
right format for the target audience and function, and repurposing and reformatting
as necessary. The problem with the pre-digital era was not that it was an age
of print, but rather that it was an age of only print.

§13. I raise all this because I believe we sell ourselves short
when we speak of "digital editions" as something that must appear on a screen.
Certain things, it is true, are probably best presented dynamically on screen.
While it is possible to represent interactivity using paper, for example—my
first experience with a networked computer was playing Star Trek at a DEC terminal
printer in the 1970s—the screen is now clearly a much better choice for
most interactive elements in contemporary digital editions.

§14. But the screen comes with its own limitations and, as a result,
is not necessarily the best presentation format for all types of information
communicated by a critical edition. I have argued elsewhere that the intellectual
sophistication of traditional print-based textual apparatus is often misunderstood
by digital editors and theorists (O'Donnell Forthcoming).
But even leaving aside places in which print tradition has developed techniques
that are hard to beat even on the screen, the fact remains that print is simply
better than print at presenting certain kinds of material for certain kinds of
uses: the communication of long and complex narratives and arguments, for example,
or material intended for ready reference.

§15. The extent to which this is true was driven home to me while
I was preparing my recent electronic edition of Cædmon's Hymn for
publication (O'Donnell 2005). The edition was originally
conceived of as a stand-alone CD-ROM and, as a result, has all the features we
normally associate with editions presented in that medium: it contains multiple
texts, an archive of witnesses, full colour facsimiles, and multiple and interactive
sets of apparatus. Cædmon's Hymn is also a major Old English poem, however,
with a long scholarly tradition and large bibliography: my edition begins, therefore,
with a relatively large introduction treating the poem in a variety of literary,
historical, and linguistic contexts.

§16. When we circulated an early drafts of the edition, however,
we quickly discovered an interesting problem: readers who received the text of
the introduction as a file for display on the screen tended to do a much poorer
job of reading the text than readers who received printouts of the same files.
Their comments often suggested they had missed crucial aspects of the argument
picked up by readers of the printed out text. One reader, in fact, missed an
entire chapter and then criticised the project for not including information
on the topic it covered. This performance difference was not a function of the
quality of the readers—we sent the text (whether in print or CD-ROM) to
equally distinguished (and overworked and overcommitted senior scholars). Rather,
as Jakob Nielsen points out in Designing Web Usability, his (printed)
book on web page design and organisation (Nielsen 1999),
the problem arose as a function of the inherent strengths and weaknesses of the
different media in presenting complex arguments: if the screen is better at interactivity,
paper is the better medium for sustained study, long narratives, and detailed
arguments.

§17. As a result of this experiment, my editors at the Society
of Early English and Norse Electronic Texts and Boydell and Brewer and I decided
to try an experiment: rather than produce the edition as a stand alone CD-ROM,
we would instead package it as a book and a CD-ROM combination: purchasers of
my edition would get both a book containing the introduction, notes, and core
texts and a CD-ROM that contained the same material as the print text but added
additional features such as colour facsimiles and an interactive textual apparatus.
This required some modification of the text for the print side of things—we
couldn't afford to print full colour facsimiles, and we were forced to choose
a single display of the text and apparatus from the numerous options available
on the CD-ROM for inclusion in the print. But we decided that we would gain much
in usability. And since the ability to repurpose data is a particular strength
of digitally produced material, we decided we could probably produce camera ready
copy quite easily from our original SGML files.

§18. As far as I can tell, the experiment seems to have been a
success. Now that the first printed book in the Society for Early English and
Norse electronic text series is available, I have spoken to several apparently
satisfied readers, many of whom seem to who have read the book quite closely
without actually putting the CD-ROM into their computer. Indeed so far, I have
met nobody who has used the CD-ROM as their primary reading text. Some have
looked at the facsimiles, and some have even tried out the interactive textual
apparatus, but almost everybody seems to have preferred the print text for their
day-to-day reading, citation, and study.

§19. This should not be surprising to us, and it certainly should
not be seen as an example of my edition's failure as a digital text. The information
that was not easily reproduced in print—manuscript facsimiles, detailed
and interactive textual apparatus and collations, alternate views of individual
texts and witnesses—are typically the type of thing that very few of us
need to consult very much in our daily lives as scholars; and when we do, we
tend to value the ability to search for or navigate directly to the relevant
information. The things that do reproduce well in print format, on the
other hand—complex arguments, standard texts, lists of significant variants—are
exactly the type of thing that most users need to use most of the time. Few of
us want to waste time booting a computer and placing a CD-ROM in the tray in
order to check a date or remind ourselves of the contents of a particular passage
in the text.

§20. Indeed I find myself using my own digital edition in much
the same way as my readers report they do. In particular, I find myself using
the print-based and screen-based texts in different and complementary ways: I
often use the electronic text for searches, or to quickly navigate to a specific
text or reading using the hyperlinked indices and table of contents. But I turn
to the printed book when I need to show something to my students or colleagues.
When I need to use a specific passage in lectures or articles, on the other hand,
I find myself often working in the opposite fashion: turning to the text of the
poem I want in the printed book and then crossing to the electronic version to
consult the interactive apparatus or facsimiles available only on the electronic
version, or to cut and paste from the text into my article or lecture.

§21. Because I have copies of the CD-ROM on all my computers I
probably use the electronic text of my edition more than most users, some of
whom may end up making relatively little use of the screen-based version. But
even if this is true, it does not make my edition any less digital. Like pedestrians
waiting for the light at the Western gate of Western Michigan University, or
my dentist as he makes a crown for my second back molar, users of my digital
edition simply will be using the output format that most suits their immediate
needs. For scholars who need to know something about Cædmon's Hymn
but don't need to know the paleographic details of individual manuscripts or
the complete range of textual variants for any one witness, print is by far
the most appropriate output medium for my digital edition: it is easy to boot,
portable, has no problems with batteries, and can be read even in strong sunlight.
For those who do need to know more about the manuscripts or textual variants,
or who need to be able to find specific wordings in order to disagree, however,
the screen based text is probably the more useful.

§22. The screen is a powerful tool. Computers have become far easier
to use since the screen-based monitor became standard, and the flexibility of
the screen makes it easy for us to build texts that are far more flexible, fluid,
and interactive than was ever possible in print. But the screen is not the computer,
and in comparing digital and pre-digital practice we need to be careful not to
confuse the part with the whole. The real difference the Digital Humanities is
making in our editorial and scholarly practice lies not in the medium of communication
but the ability to reuse and reformat content for use with different output media
as these are appropriate to the needs of the end user. In this sense print, and
perhaps even parchment (e.g. Verheyen 2004; Facsimile
Editions), can be appropriate media for the digital editor.